Yeah I know, it should be the other way around right? Well my anime club fin­ished this as our last show­ing project of the year…

It hasn’t been that long ago since the anime com­mu­nity exploded over Gur­ren Lagann and its sheer epic awe­some­ness, man­li­ness, and a healthy dose of Moe. Want another show with that Pierc­ing the Heav­ens atti­tude and all the finest parts of Gainax? Well there’s this not-well-known-enough series called Top wo Nerae! [Eng: Aim for the Top], bet­ter known as the Gun­buster and Die­buster series. For a show many anime fans have never touched (ranked #689&701 on MAL pop­u­lar­ity, com­pared to #13 for Gur­ren Lagann), the Gunbuster/Diebuster series is the ori­gin of almost every­thing Gur­ren Lagann had to offer.

Looks famil­iar? In before THAT POSE

My friend Cit­rus prefers to cat­e­go­rize Gunbuster/Diebuster in just seven words: “hard work, guts, and lov­ing your Onee-sama”. Okay, so you might be able to watch this show with Yuri Gog­gles, but it mostly par­al­lels the beloved “Soul Broth­ers” of Gur­ren Lagann. There’s also three more words which I feel must be added, which is “believ­ing in your­self”. Whether it’s believ­ing in the aniki coach who believes in you, or believ­ing in the Kouhai who believes in you, or believ­ing in your­self who believes in you, believ­ing will always be a neces­sity. Of course, you also need hard work and guts to back it up. Put all this together, strike the pose, and you have your awe-inspiring, heaven-piercing action. Sure, Gunbuster/Diebuster may not be toss­ing any galax­ies around, but we do get to throw Jupiter, slice black holes, and cre­ate Big Bangs …in dur­ing shirt-ripping action that shat­ters crazy eyeglasses.

Want any more rea­sons to watch? Gun­buster and Die­buster are respec­tively directed by Hidaeki Anno and Tsu­ru­maki Kazuya as one of their debuts. Of the two famous direc­tors, the for­mer made the orig­i­nal Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion series and is now direct­ing the new movies, while the lat­ter is co-directing the same movies while stash­ing away the widely pop­u­lar Furi Kuri under his belt (although I’m not a fan of it). Some would also claim that Gunbuster/Diebuster are the two’s great­est achievement.

The Review & Comparison

Unlike the TV-aired Gur­ren Lagann, Gun­buster and Die­buster were both released as OVAs, each with 6 episodes. Gun­buster first came out in 1988, mak­ing this one hell of a Gainax legacy show, with all the old style graph­ics and retro scifi designs of one, punch­cards and ticker tape included. How­ever, Gunbuster’s age doesn’t make it any less enjoy­able, as one really has to appre­ci­ate just how top notch the ani­ma­tion is for back in the old days. Die­buster came out much later in 2004, but because it’s the sequel to a really old series a lot of peo­ple never caught on, hence­forth its pop­u­lar­ity is remark­ably low com­pared to other Gainax top hits like Furi Kuri. Some peo­ple will doubtlessly attempt to skimp on the old Gun­buster and try Die­buster first. Sure, they’re both good as stand-alone series, but Die­buster will ref­er­ence a num­ber of Gun­buster moments and events that you won’t under­stand, let alone enjoy, unless you’ve watched Gunbuster.

You can also try the some­what short­ened movie Gun­buster vs. Die­buster first, which is what I did.

Noriko actu­ally taught Kam­ina the “who-the-hell-do-you-think-I-am KICK”

Gun­buster fol­lows the story of Takaya Noriko, a 16 year old girl who attends a machine weapon (mecha) train­ing school. At the start, Noriko seems clumsy, inse­cure, and unre­li­able, much like dear Simon the Dig­ger at the start of his adven­ture. She des­per­ately wishes to fol­low in the foot­steps of her famous father, Admi­ral Takaya Yuzo, a Space Admi­ral who was killed dur­ing the open­ing encounter of the war against the space mon­sters. After the new coach Ota Koichiro trans­fers in, he imme­di­ately began tak­ing an inter­est in refin­ing Noriko’s skills, as he was the man who owed Admi­ral Takaya his life. Through Coach Ota, Noriko pairs up with her much idol­ized school ace, her Onee-sama Kazumi Amano, whose hard work grad­u­ally awoke the Noriko’s true hid­den poten­tial: a steely deter­mi­na­tion to accom­plish any­thing, how­ever impos­si­ble, through sheer hard work and guts (sound like a cer­tain famous dig­ger?). The hard work came first as Noriko under­went rig­or­ous train­ing and climbed the rank­ing lad­ders. The guts took much longer and wasn’t drawn out until after he encounter with the young pilot Toren Smith, whose role par­al­lels Kam­ina in a great vari­ety of ways.

Train­ing: replace mar­tial artist with mecha

Die­buster takes place over 11,000 years later, in an era when mankind has evolved. Now caught in a strug­gle with a new race of con­ve­niently unnamed alien mon­sters, human­ity fights them off with a spe­cial cadre of pilots enti­tled the Top­less (a Gun­buster ref­er­ence in itself), whom are capa­ble of pilot­ing the Buster Machines due to some details that bor­der on psion­ics. This time, the story fol­lows that of Nono, a ‘young girl’ whose dream is to become a space pilot and believes every­thing is doable with enough hard work and guts. Inno­cently charm­ing, benev­o­lent, res­olute, and faith­ful to the core, Nono is the ances­tor of Nia Tep­pelin in almost every way (includ­ing the voice by Fukui Yukari), except that she’s also pure GAR in addi­tion to being MOE. After meet­ing Lal’c, a real Top­less with a seri­ous and some­what cyn­i­cal per­son­al­ity (and def­i­nitely tsun­dere), Nono decides to start fol­low­ing her Onee-sama and sought to gain a Buster Machine of her own… until she learns that a phys­i­cal Buster Machine wasn’t what she lacked at all.

The plot of Top wo Nerae revolves around the bat­tle for sur­vival between humans and a unnamed race of alien mon­sters. It’s not orig­i­nal in any way, but what makes Gunbuster/Diebuster stand out is the depth that human­ity will go to, the amount they’re will­ing to sac­ri­fice, all in the name of sur­vival, of actu­ally hav­ing a tomor­row. They’ll do what­ever it takes to defy fate and do the impos­si­ble, whether or not they really have the right to, and leave moral judg­ment of their actions to the later gen­er­a­tions whose lives depended on their actions now. This once again draws aston­ish­ing par­al­lelism to the strug­gle between the Spi­rals and the Anti-Spirals (and Spi­ral Nem­ne­sis) of Gur­ren Lagann in both action and philosophy.

To bring it all together, the dra­matic ten­sion of the story, the heart­felt rela­tion­ships between the char­ac­ters, the soul-rendering sac­ri­fices they make as they undergo trial and tribu­la­tions — you’ve seen it all in Gur­ren Lagann, watch Gunbuster/Diebuster and you’ll expe­ri­ence it yet again. As a bonus, you’ll gain a greater respect for both series.

And so you can get the par­ody behind this.

The Themes

The recipe I spoke of wasn’t actu­ally directed towards achiev­ing suc­cess for series or shows, but some­thing far more applic­a­ble: achiev­ing suc­cess as a per­son. If there’s one theme that really stood out within the Gunbuster/Diebuster series, its their take on what sets the foun­da­tional traits for the poten­tial of achiev­ing great­ness, of becom­ing a hero. There’s four ele­ments pre­sented to this, and the first three needs only a pass­ing men­tion. Hard work and guts seems to be a recur­ring moti­va­tor theme in all sto­ries, although there are few series that ham­mers it in quite as much as in Gunbuster/Diebuster (Gen­eral Armitage from Mai Otome may beg to dif­fer, as her tossing-spaceship-into-orbit scene is for­ever stamped into my mem­o­ries). Sis­terly bonds is just an inten­si­fied ver­sion of the cama­raderie focus we often see: heroes are often known by the rela­tion­ships that moti­vate and sup­port them, Buster Machine pilots are no exception.

Yet, despite Gunbuster’s best attempts (even with the Sci­ence Les­son OVA shorts), the hard work and guts failed to seize my top impres­sion of the series. The two crown­ing moments that climbed out on top are the tear­jerk­ing “Wel­come Home” scene which secured Gun­buster an excel­lent score in the drama genre, and when Nono shat­tered all lim­its in her GAR mode in Die­buster. If I can have a that-is-so-outrageously-awesome-words-fail-me moment after watch­ing Gur­ren Lagann, I won­der what I would have done if I saw that before watch­ing said series…

As I’ve once men­tioned, one of the key themes of the series is attrib­uted to “belief”, which takes many forms through­out the series but rounds itself down to believ­ing in the you who believes in your­self. Yet at the same time, “belief” is such a weak word. This isn’t sim­ply about self-confidence or con­vic­tion. No. It is about a pre­emp­tive sense of com­ple­tion, like the Kyudo con­cept of strik­ing the tar­get before releas­ing the arrow. It is about the elim­i­na­tion of all uncer­tainty, of hav­ing no doubts and absolutely zero pes­simism. It is about that first step towards the goal when your heart and mind already antic­i­pates suc­cess, no mat­ter what insur­mount­able odds you might face or how oth­ers may doubt you.

Whether you have a Buster Machine or not is irrel­e­vant! Those who think things like, “If only I had a Buster Machine,” can never reach the true top! That’s because… true power in those who believe in their own power until the very end! Surely, a true Buster Machine pilot, a true Nonoriri, has a Buster Machine inside the Heart! — Nono

That is GAR to the extreme. So much that even adjec­tives fail to con­tain it.

Those gog­gles, they indeed see noth­ing but victory.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Simoun’s Cre­ative Fan­tasy and Setting-driven Storytelling
• Emo­tional Bank­ruptcy over Ten­gen Toppa Lagann-hen
• Entranced by Base­ball: Taishou Yakyuu Musume

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